


Shoot You Dead

by Fudgyokra



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Death, Drama, First Kiss, Implied/Referenced Torture, Last Kiss, Love Confessions, Love/Hate, M/M, Self-Discovery, Violence, don't worry only HALF of the listed characters die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-24 14:38:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12014862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fudgyokra/pseuds/Fudgyokra
Summary: “Our agreement was that we would kill him together,” Edward told him, looking down on them both with a somber expression. “I haven’t failed you on that just yet, have I?”





	Shoot You Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Alternately titled "A Lesson in Four Parts" or "Last Man Standing."
> 
> While I Wrote:  
> Feels Good – Hard Fi  
> Hemorrhage – Fuel  
> Stockholm Syndrome – Nostalghia*  
> Paranoid and Aroused – Korn  
> The Royal We – Silversun Pickups  
> Target Audience – Marilyn Manson

**_Oh Stockholm syndrome,_ **   
**_Let’s get a room._ **   
**_My sweetest torture,_ **   
**_Don’t die so soon._ **

****

Gems of blood emerged from the wounds. It was fascinating, in a way, to see the streams of glistening life welling on the surface of each nasty cut every time he pressed against them with the flat edge of his knife.

“Quit playing with your food,” Joker’s voice was jesting, but his frown made it obvious he wasn’t thrilled with the situation he’d stumbled upon.

“Ah, Joker, old friend!” Edward said by way of greeting. Casually, almost aloof in nature, he stepped onto Bruce’s thigh and ground the sole of his shoe into the litany of shiny, red slash marks. “You’re just in time to watch the juicy bit.”

Bruce grunted through clenched teeth and settled his gaze on the clown, who looked right back with a strange fire in his eyes. “Well, Nygma,” the latter began without breaking eye contact, “I find that that’s a matter of opinion.”

Ed clicked his tongue thoughtfully. “You’re quite right. I had fun torturing him, but, in my opinion—”

“Which I’m sure is very humble,” Joker interjected, earning a furrowed brow in response.

“In my opinion, the finish is what really ties it all together.” He lifted his cane and aimed it at Joker’s face, suspending the golden hook of the question mark in mid-air. “Riddle me this: What’s big and black, and red all over?”

Joker smiled tersely, but did not reply.

“The answer,” Ed said, easing his voice into the self-satisfied tone of finality with a smirk, “is _Batman_.” With the word dripping from his mouth like a poison, he stabbed the blunted end of the cane into a gash in Bruce’s side, making him wriggle against his restraints with shallow breaths of suppressed agony.

“As much as I’m enjoying the view, playtime’s over.” Joker narrowed his eyes at the Riddler, who merely smiled back pleasantly.

“Why? So you can have all the fun?” Edward retracted his cane and suddenly grew to appear serious. “Not on your life, you pathetic sack of refuse.” Presently, he let the cane clatter to the floor and switched the knife to his dominant hand. “The Batman is mine.”

“Boys, learn to share,” Bruce muttered, scowling at Joker from across the way.

“Ha, ha, ha,” Joker said, running his finger over his lower lip in a strange semblance of meditation. His gaze seemed oddly vacant, if only for a few seconds, because the moment Edward knelt and put the knife to Bruce’s throat, those green eyes were aflame once again. “Nygma,” he warned.

Ed dragged the blade across Bruce’s throat in one jerk, watching with satisfaction as Joker started and Bruce gurgled uselessly on the ground.

“You piece of _shit_ ,” Joker hissed, sliding to his knees to press a palm to Bruce’s leaking throat. With a preemptive growl, he raised his voice to a shout and regarded Ed with a hateful glower. “We had an agreement!”

Bruce’s mouth hung open, and from it emerged a painful-sounding hack, which Joker took to mean “An agreement?”

“Yeah, Batcakes, I’ll explain it all to ya later. For now, ah…” He sounded weirdly panicked as he undid his tie and folded it to apply pressure on the wound. It gaped back at him, almost like a laughing maw, and he found it within himself to hate Riddler more than he had before. Frenzied, he dug around in his pockets for something, _anything_ that could mediate the startling flow of red oozing through his tie and down his fingers.

Edward, for his part, looked on in beguilement. “I’m no expert,” he began conversationally, “but that looks fatal, if you ask me.”

“I _didn’t_ ask you!” Joker snapped, spitting rage in a way Bruce usually found himself on the receiving end of. “If you let him die, you’ll ruin everything!”

“What is ‘everything,’ my dear?” Ed’s lips curled into a grin. “Everything…in you?”

Joker ignored that and adjusted himself so he was carefully straddling Bruce’s lap, avoiding the previous damage that had been inflicted upon his legs with the best of his abilities. He leaned forward and held the tie in place with a firmer grip, then used his free hand to fish for his phone.

“Our agreement was that we would kill him together,” Edward told him, looking down on them both with a somber expression. “I haven’t failed you on that just yet, have I?”

A strange kind of silence befell them. When Bruce lifted those fading blue eyes to his face, Joker found that he could not return the gesture and instead directed his glare at Edward. “This wasn’t what I had in mind,” he said flatly.

“Because what _you_ had in mind never involved killing him at all, did it?” Ed sneered and gestured aimlessly around the room with the bloodied knife in his fist. Then, in the space of a few seconds, his expression became pleasant again. “If you’d like, I’ll leave you two to your final vows.”

“Listen,” Joker mumbled, dialing a number on his phone and setting it on the ground to ring. When he refocused his gaze on Bruce, it looked like the end. “I never meant for it to… Well, you know.” He grimaced, whether at his own words or at Ed’s resulting guffaws, Bruce couldn’t be sure.

Almost tenderly, Joker reached around to untie the ropes on Bruce’s arms and free his hands. It wasn’t much use; all they did was shake, anyway. “If we’re being honest, I thought we would do this forever! We were soulmates, Bat-breath.”

“How… _saccharine_ ,” Ed deadpanned.

Joker curled his lip but said nothing to the Riddler. What he did, instead, was lift one of Bruce’s hands to replace his own on the blood-soaked tie, allowing him to hold it in place himself. “Is it horrible if I told you I love you?” he asked, not really to get an answer but simply to say it.

“It really, really is,” Ed answered, as anticipated. “Really, clown, we _did_ both kill him today.” He sighed almost dreamily. “You know what they say: Telling a man you love him, only to never speak to him again…that’s a kind of death, in and of itself.”

“I’m only telling you that now because you’re not gonna like what I do next,” Joker said as he rose to his feet. In just a few precious seconds, his body had moved to close the gap between he and Edward, sending both of them tumbling down the stairs off the platform. With practiced ease, Joker swiped one of his own choices of knives from his pocket and lodged it into the other’s ribcage.

Edward gripped Joker’s wrist yet could do nothing but stare, wide-eyed and narcotized, back at him. He watched the smile span across his face. Joker laughed, laughed and laughed and laughed like something was remarkably hilarious about it all.

Then, slowly, Ed began to laugh as well. He laughed, laughed and laughed and laughed, all the way up until he couldn’t any longer.

Joker sat on his corpse as if it were a piece of furniture and stretched his legs out in front of him. From the doorway, Jonathan Crane was nodding solemnly at him.

“Good,” was all Joker said, looking at the spot where Bruce had previously been bleeding out. “Consider us even, then.”

“Still don’t know why you’d use your one favor on him,” Jon said, just before he turned and walked away.

Into thin air, with a humorous smile, Joker said, “That makes one of us.”

* * *

 

**_I lost my fortune,_ **   
**_Buried my purse._ **   
**_You know you owe me_ **   
**_For what it’s worth._ **

****

It had been a long time since Bruce had been able to enjoy the sunlight. He didn’t know how he’d escaped the Riddler’s clutches that night, or how he’d survived the ride to the hospital, but what he did know was that he had made it out alive. He hadn’t seen the world outside his bedroom for weeks by both Alfred and the doctor’s insistence.

The word “miracle” got thrown around a lot. It was a _miracle_ he made it in time. It was a _miracle_ he healed so well. It was a _miracle_ he could still speak.

Bruce’s life certainly did not feel like a miracle. He knew, by all accounts, he should have been thankful to whatever forces had brought him to this moment, where he could stand in the privacy of his garden with coffee in his hand (disgustingly room temperature, all he could have) and sun on his face.

Then again, he’d never been a morning person.

“Good morning, Master Wayne,” Alfred greeted, bustling by him with a broom in one hand and a dustpan in the other. “Nice to see you getting up at a reasonable hour.”

“Very funny, Al,” Bruce croaked, then privately cringed at the sound. “I plan on going out tonight.”

“Tonight?” Alfred asked with a scoff. “I hardly think that’s reasonable. You need to get well.”

“I _am_ well.” He was, despite how bad it sounded to say it aloud.

As he was typically quiet for long stretches of time, Alfred’s lack of response was not surprising. Possibly, he was thinking of ways to get Bruce to change his mind. Possibly, he was thinking about what to make for dinner. One could never really be sure.

“I’ll be fine,” Bruce assured the man, anyway. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll buzz you the exact instant.”

“The exact instant?” Alfred repeated, sounding almost tired.

Bruce smiled fondly in return. “Promise.”

* * *

 

**_Depend on nothing,_ **   
**_My mother said._ **   
**_‘Cause all that loves you_ **   
**_Will shoot you dead._ **

 

It might’ve been well past time to buzz Alfred, but Bruce had lost track of what constituted things going wrong. Despite what he guessed it should’ve been, “wrong” did not seem like the right word to describe the way Joker’s pupils shrank upon seeing him, only to expand exponentially with the Batman’s next step.

“So you did make it, eh? You poor bastard,” Joker said, gaze and grin focused on his neck. “Bet it left a _nasty_ scar.”

“It did,” Bruce grumbled. “Tell me how I made it out of there.”

Joker looked scandalized. “How the hell should I know?” With a scoff and a dramatically-tossed gaze, he avoided the question like only a true liar would. Bruce wouldn’t have it; he approached with enough abruptness to shake Joker into awareness and gripped his chin, forcing their eyes to meet.

The eyes did not lie. “How did you do it?” Bruce asked.

“I have friends in high places,” Joker answered, like it was just dying to roll off his tongue. Bruce remembered what he’d told him in the cave, on what should have been his deathbed. He didn’t have to ask _why_ he’d saved his life.

The heated stare went on for far too many seconds, full of confession and yet void in the same vein. Bruce was not sure he wanted to be the one to make the first move. Did it count as the first move when Joker had already confessed? Moreover: Was it a confession if Bruce always halfway knew? There were so many questions that one kiss could not answer.

Joker’s grin was omnipresent in all his thoughts when he thrust him back against the brick, hand wrapped around his pale neck. One kiss might not have answered all the questions, but it was a damned good start.

Bruce did opt to move first, but Joker met him with enthusiasm. The adamant press of his lips and the way his hands found themselves perfectly comfortable on Bruce’s waist, digging in as if to hold him in place, felt scarily natural.

Joker was not shy; he practically pried Bruce’s mouth open with his tongue and probed without hesitance, taking what he wanted, all the while letting his hands roam across Bruce’s body. It was desperately exploratory for one thing, and contagious for another.

Bruce was on the outskirts of getting lost in the moment, deepening their kiss, dragging Joker in by the back of the neck, feeling the expanse of the man’s body pressed up against his own.

Then he heard the gun.

He was past the point of panicking when the shot fired, sending a burning, blazing hole right through his sternum. Instead, he looked up at Joker, still wrapped in his arms.

Joker stared back with wide eyes, as though the very hand of God Himself had reached down and pulled the trigger. His pupils were flitting across his face, not focusing on one point for more than a split second. He took in all that he could of the color draining from Bruce’s face and finally, finally, let a grin etch its way across his gaunt face.

Bruce put his hand over the barrel of the gun and used the other to grip Joker’s shoulder.

Shushing him as though he were a tired infant, Joker lowered him to the ground and brought the gun up to his own temple. “It’s for our own good,” he said, and before Bruce could say a word, the gun went off again.

There was a heavy spattering of blood across his face and chest, warm like ocean spray. Joker’s corpse collapsed in a heap beside him, and in the last few minutes of his life, all Bruce could think of was that there was still one more important thing to do.

Weakly, he lifted the communicator to his mouth. “Alfred,” he spoke, hardly audible, “things have gone wrong.”

* * *

 

**_And now I love him,_ **   
**_I love him true._ **   
**_There’s nothing left_ **   
**_For him to do,_ **   
**_But kill me slowly._ **

 

He couldn’t help but make the usual complaint. Alfred was fussing over nothing and all Bruce had to say was “I’m not a fan of the sunlight.”

The butler, bleary-eyed and graying, dabbed at his long-dry waterline with his handkerchief. “Just be thankful you get to see it again,” he said, gravely serious.

With a sigh, Bruce turned his head to the side. The hospital room was cold but brightly-lit, and the nurses refused all earlier requests to shut the damned curtains. He’d always hated hospitals, but this was especially aggravating.

“Nurse?” he called, hoping someone in the hall could hear him. In tandem, he was insistently mashing the call button on his bed while Alfred rolled his eyes.

“Bruce,” the man said after a moment, “I have to ask you something.”

Bruce closed his eyes. “What, Alfred?”

“Not all the red on your face was blood.”

“No,” Bruce answered honestly. “Lipstick.”

Alfred nodded, then reached up to idly rub his chin. “Why?” he asked, as though the answer to that could even begin to make him understand.

“I don’t know,” Bruce said. That part was not as honest.

“Well,” Alfred said, just before lapsing into a meditative pause. He turned his head toward the window and reached for the blinds himself. “I suppose that makes one of us.”


End file.
